Professor Janellen Huttenlocher is the William S. Gray Professor of Psychology and the College at the University of Chicago. She received the 2002 G. Stanley Hall Award for Lifetime Achievement in Developmental Psychology from the American Psychological Association. Professor Huttenlocher received her B.A. at the University of Buffalo, and her M. A. and Ph.D. at Harvard University. She has been teaching at the University of Chicago since 1974.

Professor Huttenlocher is also a member of the American Psychological Association, the Cognitive Psychology Society, Psychonomic Society and the Society for Research in Child Development. She has served on Editorial boards of the Journal of Experimental Psychology, Cognitive Psychology, as well as Psychological Review. She has also served on the Behavioral Development Study Section of the National Institute of Child Health and Development and on the National Science Foundation Panel on Memory and Cognition.

Professor Huttenlocher conducts research on various aspects of cognitive development: quantitative development, the development of spatial understanding, and the development of language. She is particularly interested in the role of the child's environment in the development of cognitive skills. In addition, her work includes research on conceptual representation and memory. She has studied the role of concepts in people's memories of events.

Contact Information:
Beecher 413
5848 S. University Avenue
Chicago, IL 60637
Fax: 773-702-0886
Email: hutt@uchicago.edu
Other Links: http://www.ccp.uchicago.edu/personalpages/personalpageindex.html

Research Interests
Dr. Janellen Huttenlocher is the William S. Gray Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Chicago. Her research spans a range of topics concerning cognition and cognitive development.

She has conducted research on various aspects of cognitive development: the development of language, quantitative development, and the development of spatial understanding.

An important aspect of Dr. Huttenlocher's work on cognitive development concerns early language development, especially the relationship between children's language skills and their language environments. She has collaborated with several students in this work. With respect to vocabulary, the studies show that the size and growth of vocabulary in early childhood is highly related to the amount of speech children hear. With respect to syntax, the studies show that the mastery of complex syntax forms (recursive devices) is highly correlated to the proportion of complex speech used by their parents. She also has done studies to establish that input is not just correlated with children's' development, but actually plays a causal role in the levels of the language skill children achieve.

In her work on quantitative development Dr. Huttenlocher has collaborated with Susan Levine as well as various students. Their findings have been reported in a book (Mix, Levine, & Huttenlocher, Quantitative Development in Infancy and Early Childhood, Oxford University Press, 2002) as well as in journal articles. This work indicates that, contrary to certain claims in the literature, infants do not represent small numbers exactly. However, in the preschool period, they develop exact number skills and can carry out calculations nonverbally prior to acquiring conventional mathematical skills.

In her work on spatial development Dr. Huttenlocher has collaborated with Nora Newcombe as well as various students. Their findings have appeared in a book (Newcombe, N. & Huttenlocher, J., Making Space: The Development of Spatial Representation and Reasoning. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000) as well as in journal articles. The work shows that certain skills and abilities arise much earlier than previously believed. The ability to use metric information in coding location can be seen even in infants, and the ability to interpret simple maps arises before four years of age.

Finally, Dr. Huttenlocher also does research on conceptual representation and memory. In this work she has collaborated with Larry Hedges and various doctoral students. They have found that categories improve the overall accuracy of the information people recover when their memories are inexact, even though the use of categories also introduces some bias in judgment. Parallel results have been found in several domains; effects of object categories on memory for particular individuals, effects of temporal categories on memory for particular dates; and effects of spatial categories on memory for particular locations.

Recent Publications

Articles

Vasilyeva, M. & Huttenlocher, J. (in press). Development of early scaling ability. Developmental Psychology.

Newcombe, N. & Huttenlocher, J. (2003). Extending space: Exploring the territory of spatial development: Book review. Human Development, 46(1), 61-68.

Mix, K., Huttenlocher, J., & Levine, S. (2003). Quantitative development in infancy and early childhood. Infant & Child Development, 12(1), 110-112.

Huttenlocher, J. & Vasilyeva, M. (2003). How toddlers represent enclosed spaces. Cognitive Science, 27(5), 749-766.

Mix, K., Huttenlocher, J., & Levine, S. (2002). Multiple cues for quantification in infancy: Is number one of them? Psychological Bulletin, 128(2), 278-294.

Huttenlocher, J., Duffy, S., & Levine, S. (2002). Infants and toddlers discriminate amount: Are they measuring? Psychological Science, 13(3), 244-249.

Huttenlocher, J., Vasilyeva, M, Cymerman, E., & Levine, S. (2002). Language input and child syntax. Cognitive Psychology, 45(3), 337-374.

Sandberg, E.H. & Huttenlocher, J. (2001). Advanced spatial skills and advance planning: Components of 6-year-olds' navigational map use. Journal of Cognition and Development, 2(1), 51-70.

Learmonth, A., Newcombe, N., & Huttenlocher, J. (2001). Toddlers' use of metric information and landmarks to reorient. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 80(3), 225-244.

Crawford, L. E., Huttenlocher, J., & Engebretson, P.H. (2000). Perceptual and category bias in reproducing visual stimuli. Psychological Science, 11, 284-288.

Crawford, L. E., Regier, T., & Huttenlocher, J. (2000). Linguistic and non- linguistic spatial categorization. Cognition, 75, 209-235.

Gao, F., Levine, S. C., & Huttenlocher, J. (2000). What do infants know about continuous quantity? Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 77, 20-29.

Huttenlocher, J., Hedges, L. V. & Vevea, J.L. (2000). Why do categories affect stimulus judgment? Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 129, 1-22.

Newcombe, N., Huttenlocher, J., & Learmonth, A. (2000). Infants' coding of location in continuous space. Infant Behavior and Development, 22(4), 483-510.

Levine, S. C., Huttenlocher, J., Taylor, A., & Langrock, A. (1999). Early sex differences in spatial skill. Developmental Psychology, 35(1), 940-949.

Mix, K., Levine, S. C., & Huttenlocher, J. (1999). Early fraction ability. Developmental Psychology, 35(1), 164-174.

Newcombe, N., Huttenlocher, J., Sandberg, E., & Lie, E., & Johnson, S. (1999). What do misestimations and asymmetries in spatial judgment indicate about spatial representation? Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 25(4), 986-996.

Huttenlocher, J., Newcombe, N., & Vasilyeva, M. (1999). Spatial scaling in young children. Psychological Sciences, 10(5), 393-398.

Huttenlocher, J. (1998). Language input and language growth. Preventive Medicine, 27(2), 195-199.

Barsalou, L. W., Huttenlocher, J. (1998). Basing categorization on individuals and events. Cognitive Psychology 36(3), 203-272.

Huttenlocher, J., Levine, S. C., & Vevea, J. (1998). Environmental effects on cognitive growth: A time period comparison. Child Development, 69(4), 1012-1029.

Mix, K. S., Levine, S. C., & Huttenlocher, J. (1997). Numerical abstraction by infants: Another look. Developmental Psychology, 33, 423-428.

Friedman, W. J., Huttenlocher, J. (1997). Memory for the time of "60 Minutes" stories and news events. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 23(3), 560-569.

Newcombe, N., Huttenlocher, J., Drummey, A. B., & Wiley, J. G. (1998). The development of spatial location coding: Place learning and dead reckoning in the second and third years. Cognitive Development, 13(2), 185-200.

Huttenlocher, J. (in press). The role of language environment in children's language skill. In N. Fox (ed.), The role of experience in brain and cognitive development.

Mix, K., Levine, S.C., & Huttenlocher, J. (2002). Quantitative development in infancy and early childhood. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Newcombe, N. & Huttenlocher, J. (2000). Making space: The development of spatial representation and reasoning. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Huttenlocher, J. & Prohaska, V. (1997). Reconstructing the times of past events. In N. Stein, P. A. Ornstein, B. Tversky, & C. Brainerd (Eds.), Memory for everyday events. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.